ARTICLES

Geographies of Development: New Maps, New Visions?∗

James D. SidawayUniversity of Amsterdam

The use of categories (such as developing world or Third World) to demarcate world regions on the basisof their levels of development is increasingly disputed. Moreover, in the last few years, references haveproliferated to the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, China), or sometimes BRICA (adding the Arab states of theGulf), as hyperlinks to future-oriented investment in the world economy. These new labels rest on more thantwo decades of discourse about “emerging markets” and are embodiments of and agents in the decompositionof the Third World as denoting a meaningful geopolitical and epistemological category. Where are andwhat then remains of the geography of development and the Third World? In addressing such questions,nuanced maps will be needed. This article sketches some alternatives. Key Words: BRICs, development,geopolitics, mapping, Third World.

El uso de categorıas (como paıses en desarrollo o del Tercer Mundo) para delimitar a las regiones delmundo sobre la base de sus niveles de desarrollo es cada vez mas disputada. Mas aun, en los ultimos anoshan proliferado las referencias a los BRICs (Brasil, Rusia, India, China), o a veces BRICA (anadiendo a losEstados Arabes del Golfo), como hipervınculos para inversiones orientadas al futuro en la economıa mundial.Estas nuevas etiquetas se basan en mas de dos decadas de debate sobre los “mercados emergentes” y son laspersonificaciones y agentes en la descomposicion del Tercer Mundo, denotando una significativa categorıageopolıtica y epistemologica. ¿Donde estan y que queda entonces de la geografıa del desarrollo y del TercerMundo? Para atender tales preguntas se necesitaran los mapas de matices. Este artıculo esboza algunasalternativas. Palabras claves: BRICs, desarrollo, geopolıtica, mapeo, Tercer Mundo.

Alternative nomenclature should be used con-sistently within a paper according to the au-thor’s demonstrated preferences. For exam-ple: Third World/developing world/two-thirdsworld.

—Style sheet for The Professional Geographer

(http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/societyimages/annals/PG%20Style%20Sheet%2040105.pdf[last accessed August 2009]

∗I wish to thank the anonymous referees for their helpful comments and the editor, Sharmishtha Bagchi-Sen, for her encouragement. In addition,this article has benefited from the suggestions of Manuel Aalbers, Isa Baud, Niels Beerepoot, Andrew McGregor, Mario Novelli, Marcus Power,and Elvin Wyly. A series of presentations also afforded an opportunity to rehearse and fine-tune the arguments: at the East Asian RegionalConference in Alternative Geography (Seoul), to the Geographies of Globalizations group at the University of Amsterdam, at the Institute ofSocial Studies (The Hague), Kings College, London, the University of Oxford and the RGS-IBG Annual Conference (London). It is dedicatedto Jasmin Leila and her moves across worlds: See http://www.rgs.org/JasminLeilaAward.

T oday, how useful is it to talk about thegeography of development or of devel-

oping countries? Where are and what remainsof the geography of development and of theThird World? Amidst a proliferation of re-lational terms, what are the consequences ofadopting such alternative nomenclature as “theSouth” and those listed by this journal’s stylesheet? New texts, hundreds of instructors, and

The Professional Geographer, 64(1) 2012, pages 49–62 C© Copyright 2012 by Association of American Geographers.Initial submission, October 2009; revised submission, March 2010; final acceptance, May 2010.

Published by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

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many more students and researchers annuallywrestle with these terms. This article reconsid-ers them in the light of the preceding questions,sketching some tentative answers in the contextof wider geopolitical and geoeconomic shifts,and building on Vanolo (2010). This is donefirst through revisiting the categories of globaldevelopment that, after 1945, were shaped bythe Cold War, American power, and recompo-sitions of “race.”1 The article then focuses on asubset of these, namely, the category of emerg-ing markets, which to some extent has dis-placed the terms Third World or middle-incomecountries, and so on, that were formulated inthose Cold War and continuing postcolonialcontexts.

Critical examination of geopolitics (and as-sociated narratives about world order, security,and identity) as discourses have been the sub-ject of several decades of scholarship (Dalby2010). This has been applied to understandingsof development (Slater 1993, 1994; O Tuathail1994). It is evident that the meta- and geocat-egories of the West, East, Third World (andyet other alternatives, such as South) thus carrydistinctive sets of meanings and are dynamicand frequently contested. In an interview, thesociologist and author of a landmark essay onSouthern Theory, Raewyn Connell (2009) re-marks how:

The geographer’s “South” is not exactly thesame as the “South” in UN trade debates,or the “third world,” or the “less developedcountries,” or the economists’ “periphery,” orthe cultural theorists’ “post-colonial” world, orthe biologists’ “southern world,” or the geolo-gists’ former Gondwana—though there is someoverlapping along this spectrum. I mainly talk of“metropole” and “periphery,” but there is enor-mous social diversity within each; recognizingthe polarity is only the beginning of analysis,not the end.

Terms such as the two-thirds world (as onThe Professional Geographer style sheet) or ma-jority world embody something of the radicalspirit that the Third World as a space of na-tional struggles, revolution, and liberation hasalso signified. The variety of terms has emergedfrom different fields. One set has to do with de-velopment politics; the others are more relatedto investors’ analyses of economies. How onehas come to partly displace the other and shifts

the focus of attention in relation to richer andpoorer countries is considered later. Thus, thenext section considers the rise and decline of thecategory Third World. As an entree, debatesabout the status and direction of the UnitedStates serve to illustrate how the category ofThird World has evolved and who, what, andwhere are redefined by it. Noting its declineand blurring (despite the arrival of the associ-ated term The Global South) sets the agenda foran account in the subsequent section of howthe BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, China) labelcame about, before the conclusions return tothe question of what still remains of the ge-ography of development and what alternativecritical maps might now be useful.

The United States as “Third World”

After World War II, the project of develop-ment was configured through the rise of theUnited States as a superpower in which Amer-ican know-how would be brought to bear intransforming the Third World and deliver-ing (Western-led) development. Much of therecent critical material on development takesthis as a point of departure. This is especiallyevident in the “postdevelopment” literature,which condemns much of what has been donein the name of development, designating it as aWestern apparatus of power and profit (such asSachs 1992; Escobar 1995). In McVety’s (2008,379) terms, therefore, the commitment (first setout as official policy by the Truman adminis-tration) to “development” was

the natural culmination of America’s historicfaith in the inherent value of technology to pro-duce “progress,” which most people had longunderstood to be a universal term. Forced notonly to look, but also to act, outward in the af-termath of World War II, the U.S. governmentessentially turned the American belief, again inde Tocqueville’s terms, in the “long track hu-manity must follow” into the foundation of anew diplomatic initiative.

The status and direction of the United Statesin recent decades is a mirror to many of thedebates about the changing global geographyof and terminology relating to development,however. In a dispatch from what he describedas a “former boomtown” in south Floridabut now a locale severely hit by fallout from

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Geographies of Development: New Maps, New Visions? 51

the “subprime crisis” and blighted by foreclo-sures and abandoned housing, a visiting jour-nalist reports on the critical reflections of itsresidents:

Around the corner, standing outside his three-bedroom home, notionally worth $780,000 . . .

“Jim Robinson”—he refuses to give his realname—smokes a cigar and admits that if hewanted to sell, he would have to drop the priceto about $600,000. But he sees the economiccollapse as extending far wider than housing:“This country is no longer an industrial power.We don’t even manufacture steel, the Saudisown 30% of Wall Street and Dubai had tobail out Citibank.” With his dense tattoos andtales of gunfights in the Sudan, Robinson isan ex-mercenary who has travelled widely inthe developing world, in conditions of drought,starvation and war. Now he sees those samechaotic conditions engulfing [America]. . . .

“These people are so clueless about what ishappening beyond their compact little world,they are absolutely clueless as to what the po-tential [for economic meltdown] could be. Youshut down the grocery store for a day and theypanic. Look at what happens when we have ahurricane! People go to stores and fight over aloaf of bread. (Franklin 2008, 12)

“Jim Robinson” is not alone in making sucha designation. When scenes of bodies in thestreets and people stranded and awaiting aidin New Orleans in the aftermath of HurricaneKatrina were beamed around the world inSeptember 2005, media commentators madecomparisons with disasters and chaos in poorThird World countries. Nearly two decadesago, the way that Los Angeles had becomean epicenter of globalization, and fragmentedby class and race, led Reiff (1991) to de-scribe it as “capital of the Third World.”Since then, a scholarly edited collection (Sawh-ney 2002) has traced such juxtapositions andfractures under the title of Unmasking LA:Third Worlds and the City. More recently, thecriteria first used to map the Third Worldvia a series of “human development” re-ports (that sought to include data for stan-dards of living, life expectancy, and socialachievement that cannot be tabulated by crudemeasures of gross national product alone2)have been applied to the United States. Theresults (Burd-Sharps, Lewis, and Martins 2008)chart a striking mixture of freedom and oppor-tunity, deprivation, and exclusions. Amidst theexpanding economic turmoil since 2008, as fi-

nancial crisis3 in most Western economies ledto new phases of restructuring and recession,the British Broadcasting Corporation’s busi-ness editor Robert Peston noted in a press in-terview (Edemariam 2008, 31) how the crisiscontained and expressed a number of shifts:

There are a number of huge trends here. Look.The moral authority, that America can lecturethe world on the best way to run their econ-omy, has been shot to pieces. . . . [Moreover]all that wealth that has accumulated in China,in the Middle East and Russia—that shifts thebalance of financial power massively in theirdirection. . . . If the Chinese got their act to-gether, and they wanted to, they could actuallyat this moment, buy the entire US banking sys-tem. . . . Which is an extraordinary thing—it’ssomething that none of us could have predicteda few years ago.

Peston’s observations reflect a wider senseof epochal shifts and a further dwindling ofU.S. hegemony. This echoes comments fromthe New York–based economist and formerU.S. Treasury advisor Nouriel Roubini, whohas become well known for his early warningsof the global collapse in real estate prices andworldwide recession. A recent media feature onRoubini noted how:

what first tipped him off were similarities he no-ticed between developing parts of the world andthe behaviour of the US economy. To his aston-ishment, he saw a pattern of economic move-ment in the US that by 2005 made it look like‘an emerging market economy,’ with the same‘irrational exuberance.’ (Testa 2009, 25)

Nonetheless, the designation of the UnitedStates as bearing characteristics of a developingor Third World country is not unproblematic.First, as Flusty (2003, 102) noted in a reviewof the edited volume Unmasking LA, there isreason to express:

dissatisfaction with the all-too-common use of“Third World” exclusively as a metaphor thatsignifies sites of colonially inflicted poverty,corruption and chaos. How soon we seem tohave forgotten the Third, nonaligned worldof the Bandung conference, the aspiration to-wards an explicitly articulated and empower-ing alternative to the imperial plutocracy of theFirst World and the imperial bureaucracy of theSecond.

I return to such aspirations and connotationslater. It is important first, however, to record

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another, related objection to the use of thedesignation “Third World” in what hithertowere customarily seen as “First World” or de-veloped countries. For as Slater (1994, 237) re-minded us:

“Third World” implies more than “poverty,”“income disparities” and “lack.” . . . if certainregions of the developed world are being subjectto a process of “Third Worldization,” this mustmean that these regions have been colonizedby an external power, their native populationsset to work on plantations and down mines andtheir indigenous culture despised.

Arguably, many Native Americans and otherfolk historically on the margins in the UnitedStates might find aspects of their collectivehistory that embody such processes. Leavingaside, for the moment, the questions aboutthe extent to which the term Third World re-mains meaningful and exactly where or whatit usefully depicts, it is notable that in thesubdivisions and subdisciplines of geographicalscholarship (in both teaching and research), de-velopment and its geographies still occupy akey niche, which in turn is part of a wider mul-tidisciplinary program of research and teach-ing in development studies (Desai and Potter2008). It is now widely acknowledged acrosssuch scholarship that the category of the ThirdWorld and understandings of development firstemerged in the aftermath of World War IIand as such were profoundly shaped by thecombination of decolonization and the ColdWar. Recent social/cultural, intellectual, andliterary histories have done much to excavatethis.4 Yet, as has also been noted, the ThirdWorld acquired a wide variety of meanings, es-pecially as it was claimed by movements of na-tional liberation and revolution—and was alsothe subject of a voluminous literature (see note1). Indeed, for a while, the idea that the des-tiny of humanity would be set by the course ofrevolution in the Third World became influ-ential, for example, in the writings of FranzFanon or couched in terms of freedom anddecolonization. Geertz (2005, 2) characterizedthis as “istiqlal, merdeka, uhuru, swaraj, andthe rest,” citing the mobilizing slogans fromArabic, Malay, Swahili, and Hindi. Thus, asPrashad (2007, xv) has argued:

The Third World was not a place. It was aproject. During the seemingly interminable bat-

tles against colonialism, the peoples of Africa,Asia and Latin America dreamed of a new world.. . . They assembled their grievances and aspira-tions into various kinds of organizations, wheretheir leadership then formulated a platform ofdemands. . . . The “Third World” comprisedthese hopes and the institutions produced tocarry them forward.

Nonetheless, as Prashad (2007) carefullydocumented, this ideological project unfoldedthrough a variety of nodes and sites: It could bemapped. At the start of the 1980s, for example,the Independent Commission for InternationalDevelopment Issues (under the chair of the for-mer Social Democrat chancellor of then WestGermany, Willy Brandt) published its reportswith a cover demarcating a global (North and)South by a line running through parts of themap of the world. Through the 1980s, however,the potency of that revolutionary moment thathad engendered the idea of the South/ThirdWorld and an array of associated perspectives(dependency and Third Worldism) was in de-cline. Moreover, the emergence of the newlyindustrialized countries and economies (no-tably Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea,and Taiwan) characterized a sense of growingeconomic diversity within the so-called ThirdWorld. Reflecting this, in the mid-1980s, Har-ris (1986) could write of The End of the ThirdWorld: Newly Industrializing Countries and theDecline of an Ideology, amidst debates about “howmany worlds” might be needed to character-ize increasingly diverse spaces of development.The blurb to Harris’s book claimed that “Itwas high time we stopped making facile gen-eralizations about ‘the Third World’; instead. . . we must tease out the factors which haveleft some countries desperately backward whileothers are catching up with us fast.”

At the same time, the Global South was in-creasingly being used as an alternative term forthe residual “non-Western world”—contra thecompetitive market players. Taylor et al. (2009,836–37) thus noted:

In the last decade the term “Global South”has become a new favoured term to describethe poorer countries of the world. Widely usedacross academia—for instance, in environmen-tal studies . . . in political science . . . in eco-nomics . . . and in geography . . . —it has beenadopted by UN agencies . . . making the term insome sense “official.”

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Geographies of Development: New Maps, New Visions? 53

They also described it as a “chaotic con-cept,” as it is unable to capture the range ofeconomies and polities that it claims to sig-nify with one label. Indeed, the eclipse of theCold War and the ensuing new geographies ofglobalization and commerce embodied deepershifts. For through the 1990s, with the “Sec-ond World” gone and rescripted as “transi-tion economies,” the place of a collective ThirdWorld or South was even more fundamen-tally in question. Thus, at the end of thatdecade, Therien (1999) charted the limits to aNorth–South framework and the emergence ofalternative narratives. More recently, Kreutz-mann (2008) has mapped the proliferation ofways in which the world is conceptually or-dered and divided, from the height of the first-,second-, and third-world era of the middletwentieth century to a range of post–Cold Warnarratives framed in the context of globaliza-tion. It is in such a context of attention tothe significance of discursive frames and withthe decline of the Third World as a credi-ble signifier that critical debate has turned onthe category of “emerging markets” formu-lated in corporate discourse. Embodying neo-liberalism and reworking prior categories, thedesignation of emerging markets began witha section of the World Bank and was soonembraced by fund managers, traders, and thefinancial media in the early 1990s. Duringthe ensuing long boom (through “turbulence,”such as the Asian financial crisis of the late1990s), the category was finessed and subdi-vided. The following considers the range andimpacts of these reworkings.

Emerging Markets to BRICs

Since the term emerging markets entered cir-culation, cycles of boom and bust have led tomodifications in the range of countries it labels.Geographers have registered such shifts, not-ing, in the words of Lai (2006, 627), “the in-triguing geographical ‘imagineering’ that goesinto the construction and maintenance of‘emerging markets’ (EMs) as a category, andthe roles played by fund managers, brokers andanalysts.”

The term was first established in the secondhalf of the 1980s within a unit of the WorldBank, to designate equity investments in se-

lected countries within what was then moreusually called the Third World (Sidaway andPryke 2000). In the last few years, corporate an-alysts have further reworked the emerging mar-kets designation. Since 2001, they have come totalk of the BRICs, a subset of giant economiesset to become the world’s largest. The termwas popularized via a series of widely dis-seminated global investment research reportsproduced by analysts at the investment bankGoldman Sachs (2003, 2005, 2007). The mostrecent turmoil in financial markets is being readin a range of ways, sometimes against but moreoften as confirmation of the thesis (set out inthose successive Goldman Sachs reports) thatChina and India will dominate production ofgoods and many services and Brazil and Russiaserve as key markets and raw materials suppli-ers. Other economies are frequently presentedas parts of this subset, notably those of theArab Sultanates of the Persian Gulf coast andother developmental states in Asia (e.g., SouthKorea or Taiwan), but the scale and popula-tion of the BRICs are seen to confer a spe-cial role as the leading non-Western economiesand as future motors of global accumulation.In this narrative, the scale of the BRICs meansthat their aggregate wealth (even at consider-ably lower than Western or Japanese per capitalevels) will exceed that of the Organizationfor Economic Co-operation and Development(OECD) economies.

The diversity of the components and manyof the assumptions made about the roles of theBRICs are questionable. Nonetheless, over thenine years or so since Goldman Sachs’s inven-tion of the category—and the sense of epochaltransformations that it invoked—it has cap-tured the imaginations of corporate and busi-ness media. Symptomatic of this are the twoconsecutive Newsweek magazine covers (for theAsian edition of this magazine) that were pub-lished in the middle of the Northern Hemi-sphere in the summer of 2007 that featured“The New Middle East” (subtitled “The Re-markable Rise of the Gulf Could Transform theRegion and the World”) and “Beijing Rising”(subtitled “The Olympics Face-Lift Is the MostDramatic Reconstruction of a World Capital,Ever”). Both covers showed visions of spec-tacular new urban landscapes. In the case ofthe image of Beijing, an architect’s model of acityscape of new skyscrapers was shown. In the

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Figure 1 Rendering of the Abu Dhabi Performing Arts Center by Zaha-Hadid Architects used on thefront cover of Newsweek (Asia edition) 6 August 2007. Image supplied and copyright permission grantedby Zaha-Hadid Architects. (Color figure available online.)

case of the feature on the Gulf, the Newsweekcover bore an image of an architect’s computerrendering of the contracted Abu Dhabi Per-forming Arts Center (Figure 1). The impactof such international English-language newsmagazines (in tandem with other print media)as distillations of wider geopolitical discourseshas occasionally been the subject of criticalscrutiny. For example, thirty years ago, theroles of Time magazine in scripting the PersianGulf as a key American strategic arena were evi-dent. In tandem with statements from key mili-tary figures and politicians, Time thus presentedthe Gulf as vital to America’s security (Sidaway1998). More recently, Campbell (2007) has ex-amined how Darfur became a space demandinghumanitarian action (in the context of manyother sites of violence that have not been privi-leged as such) by exploring the visual economyand visual field of the print media in this pro-cess. Representations of hunger, poverty, andviolence (as signs of underdevelopment) endureand retain a deep hold in such media. Theseare now also refracted through concerns aboutsecurity and “failed states” (think of Somaliaor Yemen) in the context of the war on ter-ror (Roberts, Secor, and Sparke 2003). Thus,the taxonomy of states and sites meriting de-velopment assistance from Washington, DC,

has recently been reworked by the U.S. Agencyfor International Development (Essex 2008).Yet the successive Newsweek cover stories em-body a different narrative of excess, modernity,and influence. In other words, selected partsof what was the Third World are now beingrepresented as more dynamic and modern thanthe West. In parallel terms, a story three yearslater in The Economist (“Rethinking the “thirdworld”: Seeing the world differently” 2010), re-produced a cartogram indicating how the worldeconomy is expected to be configured by 2015,whereby parts of Asia evidently loom large(Figure 2), noting how:

Trade between developing countries, and be-tween them and the BRICS, is rising twiceas fast as world trade. Even more strikingly,while growth has headed south, debt has headednorth, the opposite of what happened in the1970s and 1980s, when poor countries ran upvast debts. Gross public debt in the rich coun-tries is rising, from about 75% of GDP at thestart of the crisis in 2007 to a forecast 110%by 2015, says the IMF. Public debt in emergingmarkets is below 40% of GDP and flat. (69)

Although bullish about the prospects forBRICs and imperative about seeing the worlddifferently, the range of terminology used in thearticle indicates the endurance of older terms

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Figure 2 The projected structure of the world economy in 2015, with country size adjusted in line withprojected gross domestic products. Used in The Economist (2010). © Copyright SASI Group (Universityof Sheffield) and Mark Newman (University of Michigan). (Color figure available online.)

(poor and developing) amidst emerging mar-kets and BRICs. Even the Third World is notthoroughly passe: “Whatever you call it, thecategory still matters . . . for trade, to non-governmental organisations and in the UnitedNations” (68).

At the same time, in policy and academicliteratures, a substantial strand of work hasemerged on the role of (to use the favoredterm) “Asian drivers,” primarily a term forChina and India and a “cluster of other coun-tries in the Asian region” (Kaplinsky and Mess-ner 2008) in setting agendas elsewhere in Asia,Africa, and the Americas (Gu, Humphrey,and Messner 2008; Ravallion 2009). On arelated track, a key report copublished bythe World Bank and Singapore’s Institute forPolicy Studies entitled Dancing with Giants:China, India and the Global Economy seeks tochart “China’s and India’s interactions withthe global trading and financial systems andtheir impact on the global commons, partic-ularly with regard to climate” (Bourguignon,Devarajan, and Kharas 2007, viii). The grow-ing role of China, India, and other Asian andGulf states as aid donors (McCormick 2008)and investors (Helleiner 2009) also recon-figures the north–south framework in whichdevelopment has been conceived during thetwentieth century. Six (2009, 1103) went as

far as arguing that “The rise of new statedonors such as China or India questionsnot only the established modes of devel-opment co-operation but also the develop-ment paradigm as a whole.” For Six, theWestern framing of development is nowfading in the context of a series of eco-nomic and political shifts. Six probably over-stated the extent of the shifts (see Ho-Fung2009 for a more circumspect interpretation ofChina’s role), but the transformations are alsobeing registered in the architecture of inter-national governance. At the September 2009meeting of the group of the twenty largesteconomies (G20), The Economist (“The role ofemerging markets: Cosmetic surgery” 2009)joined other media in noting how

The G20 meeting in Pittsburgh secured theplace of emerging markets at the top tableof global economic policy. “Bretton Woods isbeing overhauled before our eyes,” declaredRobert Zoellick, head of the World Bank. TheG20 leaders agreed to shift voting power sub-stantially within the IMF towards “dynamicemerging markets and developing countries,”and endorsed similar reform at the World Bank.

It is now widely perceived that the re-cession following the credit crunch has ac-celerated the movement. Claims that, as the

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London-based Sunday Times newspaper put it,“Goldman [Sachs] has dodged the credit-crunch bullet and is emerging from the crisisstronger than ever” (Arlidge 2009, 24), havealso reinforced the authority of their BRICslabel.

Accompanying such shifts is a growingawareness that modernity cannot be de-fined primarily by reference to First World(Western and then Japanese) cities, as hascustomarily been the case in the nineteenthand twentieth century. Agendas of what itmeans to be modern5 are increasingly shapedby places such as the cities of the Pearl RiverDelta in south China (Simpson 2008) or thepetro-dollar-saturated sultanates (cities suchas Doha or Dubai) on the Gulf coast of theArabian Peninsula (Elsheshtawy 2010). Recentfinancial turbulence has now halted someconstruction projects there, but Dubai alreadyhad the world’s tallest skyscrapers and largestmalls and most of the dozen next biggest arein China, Malaysia, or Taiwan. In the light ofthese transformations, it is worth returning tothe opening questions in this article about howuseful is it to talk now about the geographiesof development or developing countries. Inturn, that question takes us back to an olderone: What does development mean? Theconclusions reconsider these.

Conclusions

Although the classification of nationaleconomies in tables of development fails tocapture the nuances of uneven development(and arguably masks many transnationaltrends), this remains profoundly influential,bolstered by an apparatus of surveillance anddata collection (tabulated by the World Bankand other UN agencies) that articulate, withcorporate practices. Although long mindful ofthese, the geography of development (sinceits emergence from tropical, commercial,and economic geography6) has always beenboth caught up in and a reflection of widerreconfigurations and transformations.

Today, although profound geopolitical andgeo-economic shifts are evident, arguably whatparticularly merits geographical scrutiny is theway that these are represented. Such represen-tations are complicit in the processes they seekto describe. Put simply, ideas such as BRICS are

more than merely descriptive labels. They be-come means of making mental maps and claim-ing the future. Interviewed in 2010, the veteranMarxist historian Eric Hobsbawm (2010) an-swered that among the key trends since thepublication of his landmark Age of Extremes(1991) was the emergence of a new entity, “theBRICS.” And the capital markets editor of theFinancial Times set out how:

in the past decade, Bric has become a near-ubiquitous financial term, shaping how a gener-ation of investors, financiers and policy makersview the emerging markets. . . . Financial insti-tutions now run Bric funds; business schoolshave launched Bric courses. . . . Bric . . . hasredrawn powerbrokers’ cognitive map, helpingthem to articulate a fundamental shift of influ-ence away from the western world. (Tett 2010,1)

In turn, the label is being adopted by thoseit designates. In July 2009, the four heads ofstate met in the Russian city (over 800 mileseast of Moscow) of Yekaterinburg. Dubbingthemselves the first BRIC summit, their jointstatement called for measures “to advance thereform of international financial institutions,so as to reflect changes in the global economy”(President of Russia 2009). The FinancialTimes correspondent was surely right to go onand claim that “When the cognitive map isredrawn . . . even in the world of marketingand investment bank ‘spin’—it tends not to beerased so much as appropriated” (Tett 2010, 2).Indeed, as this article has sketched, the rise andcirculation of BRICs also rests on two decadesof emerging market discourse and are embod-iments of and agents in the decomposition ofthe Third World as denoting a meaningfulcategory. Third World is now more likelyto be invoked for its historical resonances,rather like the term Soviet Bloc. Or it mightbe used to describe a site of poverty, decay, ordisorder that could be anywhere. Thus, NewOrleans after Hurricane Katrina or the con-ditions for patients in some badly run public(although thoroughly corporatized) hospitalsin Britain are sometimes described by mediaas being Third World scenes. What, then, ofgeography of development? Where and whatremains of the geography of development? Inaddressing such questions, nuanced maps willbe needed.

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One path is to examine the proliferationof landscapes of enclosure (see the typologyby Vasudevan, McFarlane, and Jeffrey 2008)and enclave spaces that are bound up with thewider transformations in the global divisionof labor. Arguably therefore, “prior meta-geographical demarcations: the categoriessuch as ‘Developed’ and ‘Third World’ (whichemerged in the years after the Second WorldWar and long provided key points of reference,commitment, analysis and mobilization) haveshattered and re-converged around enclaves”(Sidaway 2007a, 336). The past three decades,coinciding with the other global shifts chartedearlier, have therefore witnessed a proliferationof export processing/malquiladoras, tourist,financial, residential, and extractive mining(and similarly demarcated and often fenced)zones. Like the plantations of old, these can bepartially disembedded from their immediatesurroundings at the same time as they becomeintegrated into the global economy. Indeed,they are often gated, but they are linked toeach other and to other nodes of power.The residential and consumption expressionsof these (epitomized in the artificial islandsbeing constructed in the Persian Gulf andgated communities in China, Indonesia, etc.)have been described as “dreamworlds ofneoliberalism” (Davis and Monk 2003).

The relationships of these sites and zoneswith states, workers, residents, and markets andto the macrolevel transformations that labelssuch as BRIC seek to capture and shape consti-tutes a broad research agenda. Intersections ofenclosure and enclavization with macroshifts inthe geography of accumulation demand care-ful scrutiny (Benjamin 2000; Sidaway 2007b;Jackson and della Dora 2009; Sheller 2009).Although the comparative specification of howthese intersect and what this means for work-ers, residents, and consumers requires furtherdetailed work, one example and a broader the-oretical and political challenge must suffice asa close to this article.

Taking the political direction first, it is in-structive to ask how established categoriesof citizenship (with rights and political alle-giances) might better be captured by the term“denizen” (derived from the sense of a dwellerwithin a demarcated zone) to denote the rangeof and limits to expectations and obligations ofindividuals who live, labor, or play within or

across such spaces (Shearing and Wood 2003).Consider, for example, what citizenship meansand how it is thus reconfigured for a youngwoman worker in an East Asian export pro-cessing zone, whose rights to reside thereinare partly governed by a contract of employ-ment with a transnational corporation. Or for ayoung male who has a four-year contract (sub-ject to clauses about conduct and good health)to live and work in a tourist enclave in Indonesiahundreds of miles from his “home” community.Consider how residence and citizenship shiftsfor wealthy Lebanese, Dutch, Cuban, Egyp-tian, or British-born executives or celebrities,who spend months each year in (gated) real es-tate that they have purchased as homes for fam-ily and friends in Persian Gulf or Caribbeanjurisdictions. They might no longer be resi-dent for tax purposes in, say, London, Miami,Mumbai, Amsterdam, or Frankfurt (where theypreviously lived and still own property and haveextended family connections and some busi-ness interests). These political and theoreticalquestions articulate with wider debates aboutsubjectivity and sovereignty, but it is an-other example that raises other questions ofhistorical-geographical parallels.

In late 2008, Daewoo logistics announcedthat it planned to pay nothing for a concessionof agricultural land in Madagascar (to beused for palm oil and maize cultivation), oneof a number of such new phases of agricul-tural concession and enclosure being madearound the world. The land would—it wasclaimed—be granted rent-free; the benefitto Madagascar—once led by an avowedlyMarxist regime (see Covell 1987)—was theemployment possibilities for an impoverishedpopulation. Maps (from which Figure 3 is de-rived) appeared in the press indicating the vastareas at stake. The deal did work out as origi-nally envisaged and there have been subsequentclarifications from Daewoo and political tur-moil in Madagascar. The expectation orprospect of a free lease is possibly unprece-dented in the region, however, since thecolonial epoch when, across the Mozam-bique Channel, prazos (extended leases) weregranted in the Zambezi Valley of what wouldbecome Mozambique (Isaacman 1972). Thesites in Madagascar (and others around theworld—see Figure 4) lead to the question ofhow, in Moore’s (2008, 258) terms, geobodies

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Figure 3 Concessions sought by Daewoo in Madagascar in late 2008. Drawn by the CartographicResources Unit at the University of Plymouth, UK. Compiled by the author from a range of mediasources.

Figure 4 Transnational investment in agricultural mega-projects, 2008. Drawn by the CartographicResources Unit at the University of Plymouth, UK. Compiled by the author from a range of mediasources.

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become “entangled with the striations ofracialized dispossession from previous historiesof sovereignty, violence and subjection.”

A testing and profoundly geographicalagenda returns: charting these contests andtheir relations to the past, present, and aspi-rations of development.

Postscript

How will the issues in this article and theirinterpretation look in two decades—or more?Further BRIC summits have already takenplace, including one at which South Africa wasformally admitted to the group; henceforth tobe the BRICS. The Economist (“A More HopefulContinent” 2011, 67) reports that Africa’s ‘lioneconomies are earning a place alongside Asia’stigers’, noting how since the millennium, sixof the worlds ten fastest growing economiesare in Africa. And since this article was ac-cepted for publication in May 2010, a series ofhigh profile intergovernmental and corporatereports have reinforced impressions of a shift-ing global economic geography that reconfig-ures maps of development/underdevelopment.Constraints on space preclude me from cit-ing more than two of these here (The WorldBank 2011; Ward 2011). Comprising severalgenres, such as corporate and intergovernmen-tal reports, extensive media discussions, blogs(http://blogs.ft.com/beyond-brics/) and so on,a discourse is in the air. This is a particu-lar way of seeing, interpreting, and enactingwhat critical work in geography has conceptual-ized as uneven development. That critical workalso reminds us that perceptions of epochalchange are not in themselves new and anhistorical—geographical moment should notbe known simply by its own consciousness.Hence, ongoing geographical research mustforeground accompanying struggles, contra-dictions, and counter-discourses. Other waysof knowing the world are possible. �

Notes

1 Over the last decade, the historiography of this pe-riod has become much richer in excavating such in-tersections. Key works are Bair (2009), Borstelmann(2001), Engerman et al. (2003), Latham (2000), Ple-hwe (2009), Reynolds (2008), and a recent set ofpapers published in the journal Diplomatic History(2009, Vol. 33, No. 3). Among many other sources,

the radical responses from the Third World formthe subject of Prashad’s (2007) volume and a set ofpapers on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniver-sary of Third World Quarterly (Berger 2004). Seealso Simon (2009) for another line of enquiry intothe moment “when development was all new, theworld was full of optimism and the prospects fordevelopment and poverty alleviation were unques-tioned” (881).

2 See Thirlwall (2008) and White (2008) for more onthe Human Development Index and other indexes.See Power (2006) for some useful background on itscreation and the key role of the Pakistani economistMahbub Ul Haq (1934–1998) in establishing theindex as a widely used measure, via the UnitedNational Development Program’s Human Devel-opment Report series. See Morse (2008) and Rigg(2008) for other critical reflections on developmentindexes.

3 The naming of the crisis merits reflection. As notedin Sidaway (2008, 197): “the media don’t usually callthis a predatory lending crisis, let alone an Americancrisis. Arguably however, such alterative labels shiftthe ways that the crisis is interpreted.”

4 In addition to the U.S.-focused literature cited ear-lier, see Kothari (2005) on the British role and case.For a case study of a site of development that was,like many others in the Caribbean, shaped by firstBritish and then American power, see Wainwright(2008).

5 This has evolved in tandem with a deconstructionof the claim that the experience of the West is thechief arbiter of modernity. In other words, it rec-ognizes that there are multiple (geographical andhistorical) experiences of and modes of modernity(Eisenstadt 2000). In turn, these relate to wider de-bates about Eurocentrism and the long term of theworld system. The literatures on these are vast, butfor an interpretation of what he termed the reorien-tation to an Asia-centered world system, from a writerwhose earlier work on development and underde-velopment was briefly influential, see Gunder Frank(1998).

6 This past of development geography is a com-plex story connecting narratives about commerceand “race,” with imperialism and physical geog-raphy, in the form of environmental determinism(Barnes 2000; Power and Sidaway 2004). With re-spect to the latter, Poon and Yeung (2009, 3) notedhow “These debates have been particularly revital-ized among scholars, policy makers and the pop-ular media since the publication of Jeffrey Sachs’(2005) The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities forOur Time linking economic underdevelopment toenvironmental and locational constraints (‘bad ge-ography’). Do geographic factors account for dif-ferences in growth and development . . . as Sachsso forcefully argues?” As another paper (in the setthat Poon and Yeung assembled) addressing Sachs

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argued, asking this “is perhaps less important thanasking how political economic and policy processesconvert these geographic conditions into factorsthat do have material implications” (Bebbington2009, 11). The mirror image of Sachs’s advocacyof aid for and stress on environmental constraintson development is Moyo’s (2009) Dead Aid: WhyAid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Wayfor Africa, emphasizing economic and political mis-management, although both also advocate market-led strategies. Both are also in a long tradition ofdiagnoses (and self-diagnoses) of the African con-dition. As a counter to either, Rodney (1972) orChabal and Dalosz (1999) is rewarding. Accordingto her Web site, Moyo once worked for GoldmanSachs and is now writing a sequel about how theBRICs and selected Middle East countries are setto become dominant players in the twenty-first cen-tury.

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JAMES D. SIDAWAY is Professor of Political andCultural Geography and a member of the Geogra-phies of Globalization research program in the De-partment of Geography, Planning and InternationalDevelopment Studies at the University of Amster-dam, Nieuwe Prinsengracht 130, Amsterdam 1018VZ, The Netherlands. E-mail: j.d.sidaway@uva.nl.His principal scholarly interests are geopolitics andpolitical geography and the history and philosophyof geographical thought.

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